Category: justice

Short Cuts and Insults (or caveat emptor and cave familiam)

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God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or any deity you think is running things has a peculiar penchant for piling on. When one thing goes bad, seemingly, every other hanger-on in your life decides now is the time to make the wheel squeak. And the problems fall like rain.
 
I’ve written before about how no good deed goes unpunished. The ultraviolet bookend to that infrared light is that bad deeds also go unpunished. The guy who cuts you off in traffic and weaves in and out of traffic will have his feet up at home while you’re adhering to the rules of the road. He will also be responsible for an exponentially disproportionate number of accidents in which he will not participate.
 
When told the money promised to me was being taken away, I was given notice by an attorney to sign, notarize, and return a document giving away my promised portion. Not that it was a choice, but I “agreed” because it was the “right” thing to do, even if the execution/request was unbelievably insulting and hurtful, and contact with me was a mere afterthought. Still, I acquiesced. That is when God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or your deity of choice decided to pour acid on the open wound.
 
Our house is 22 years old. In house years, that is young. However, when my wife and I noticed rotting OSB plywood under a window in the garage, we contacted our handyman friend to repair it. What we discovered can only be described as catastrophic. He chased where the leak originated and determined it began above the window. The decorative header above the window was installed incorrectly by the original builder. Nailed directly into the siding on top of the clapboards and without the standard spline of thick sticky tape placed around the window, the nails invited water into the OSB plywood and destroyed the wall from the inside. With that fixed (which involved removing the entire window and reframing the wall), he poked around other similarly constructed windows on the front of the house. Every window had the same rot and destruction. We are rebuilding the front of our home from the outside in. And when they cut out the old studs, they cut into the drywall inside the house, requiring that, too, to be patched and repainted. What started as a simple job now costs us tens of thousands.
 
Piling on is contagious. This week has been hot by Rhode Island standards (high 80s). We called the HVAC contractor when the downstairs air conditioning system malfunctioned. While 22 years is not old for a house, it is for HVAC systems. Replacing it will cost another $12,000.

I haven’t mentioned that the next year also includes us paying for a baby shower, a bridal shower, and a wedding—our fourth wedding in four years. Piling on is contagious.
 
I would not have received the amount I gave away for many years. Paying for the house problems now will cause us to tap into our retirement. The fact that I will not see that amount in the future compounds the insult without consideration by anyone involved. Indeed, the amount we will soon be out of pocket today, withdrawn from our retirement account, is equal to the amount I would have received in the future. It would have been an offset mitigating today’s hemorrhaging. Not having that amount in the future doubles the financial impact. God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or your deity laugh while man plans. What a sense of humor. No good deed goes unpunished.
 
The only information I have regarding home building is from watching This Old House. With that limited knowledge, I know you use pressure-treated 2x4s on the sill plate (the wood placed on the concrete foundation. My house does not. Tommy Silva on TOH instilled in me that you always use the wide, sticky tape as a spline around windows and doors to seal disparate connections to prevent water infiltration. My house does not have this around any window or door. This begs several questions. Why would the home builder not use these standard building elements? How did the town building inspector not identify these omissions? Did money change hands somewhere to look the other way? We found a patch in three locations, indicating the previous homeowners knew of the problem. Why did they not disclose it when selling the house?
 
Ah, but there must be some recourse we can take to compensate us for this monumental cost! Alas, no! Our homeowner’s insurance policy only covers mold and mildew, not ridiculously poor construction. The statute of limitations against the builder expired ten years after construction. The town has immunity (nice!). Even the inspector we hired before purchasing benefits from a three-year statute of limitations (not that he would have seen anything behind the clapboards and shingles). We could go after the previous owners; however, considering the cost of attorneys and court fees, we would never be made whole or satisfied. There is no punishment for bad behavior. 
 
We have our health, save for the foot surgery I had at the end of May to place screws inside bones that did not heal from a break last October. The frustration, anger, and resignation we feel cannot be erased because we have our health. It is cumulative. We are frustrated, angry, and resigned, AND we have our health.
 
Nice guys finish last, and jerks succeed. And karma? The jerks invented karma as an empty promise to those upon whose necks they place their boot.

Writing is cathartic for me. I know the situation does not change when I vent on paper, but somehow, I feel better—a little better. If you can take anything from this story, all the better. Caveat emptor and cave familiam.

My Generational Fallacy

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Maxwell and Finnegan

I am a middle-aged white man. And I can recognize some, but not all, of the societal privileges afforded to me for no other reason than I am a white man. I feel it is important to establish that upfront. I have accomplished things in life partly due to my efforts and partly because of my accident of birth. Accident of birth. What else can I call it? In addition to being born a white male, I was also born in the United States. Again, not of my choosing. But here I am, and I accept the failings in my life as my burden, my fault. I take full ownership of my failures but share my victories as being due to my efforts, others’ efforts, white privilege, and the combination of those factors occurring here in the United States.

The paragraph above is enough to exclude me from the Libertarian party, who believe they alone are responsible for the air they breathe, and they’d like you to thank them for making enough for you like it’s Reardon Steel.

With that backdrop established, let me tell you a little about my upbringing. My first best friend was black. We shared the same first name. When he or I moved away, I’m not sure what happened (I was young and cursed with a terrible memory), my next best friend was Jewish. And the thing is, it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Or I hadn’t learned from society to hate yet. The only thing I now hate is willful ignorance. I learned so much from my friend about Judaism, its holidays, and the amazing food! I was raised Catholic (as was most of the state in which I was raised). I assumed everyone was Catholic. It wasn’t until much later that I learned Catholicism was itself but a branch of Christianity and Christianity a branch of organized religion.

Throughout my life, until I was probably 30 years old, I assumed that the problems of the past were destined to be solved by my generation. Racism being foremost in my mind and the easiest to solve. It was just wrong! That’s easy to fix, I thought. It was, I thought, the low-hanging fruit of justice, and I assumed I no longer lived in a country responsible for strange fruit (listen to the song). I also thought later in life that gun violence in America would be easily fixed after 26 first and second-graders (and educators) were slaughtered at Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT. In both situations, I learned there was a generational fallacy in my thinking. I assumed my and subsequent cohorts, armed with better information, compassion, and the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, would see the obvious path to social justice. How I was wrong! Chronological snobbery? Maybe. I now believe it is a combination of regional biases and willful intransigence that prevents solving society’s problems.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 94 years old now if he had not been murdered at age 39 in 1968. What he did, what all who fought for civil rights in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and accomplished, cannot be appreciated using today’s time prism. The Overton Window has undoubtedly shifted on civil rights and many other topics.  What they accomplished then, at great personal risk and, for some, with their lives, is monumental. However, the Overton Window is not a slider moving in one direction but a pendulum constantly swinging between the warmth of progress and the cold intransigence of those benefiting from the status quo. “Make America Great Again” is the most recent example of this philosophical ossification. “Progress” is seen as a threat to their privilege. Equity and equality are, ironically, seen as unfair. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are seen as nefarious as Affirmative Action. After George Floyd was murdered by the police, DE&I programs blossomed nationwide, and workplaces and communities benefited from new thinking. Unfortunately, today we see the pendulum swinging the other way and DE&I programs being cut in red states all across an even more divided America.

I saw an interview with Martin Sheen recently. He has been arrested for protesting more times than he can count. And it has cost him roles. He said, “If what you believe doesn’t cost you anything, then you’re left to question its value.” He is 83 years old now. And I couldn’t help but appreciate his passion.

I confess to being a West Wing fanatic. I adored that show (especially the first four seasons written by Aaron Sorkin). I think the season finale of the second season (Two Cathedrals) is the best episode of television ever created. That said, and while I remain a devout fan, I also think it ruined politics for me and a generation of those like me. I assumed life was a meritocracy and not the plutocracy and cleptocracy it truly is. I appreciated the sincere debate depicted in the show and assumed that was how politics worked. Today, there is no debate, only sound bites, social media gotcha’s, net zero wins, and tribalism, where a foundation of facts cannot be agreed upon. We can’t even agree on what is a fact!

Martin Sheen lives how Aaron Sorkin writes.

Contrast that with today’s news that 25-year-old NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a disgusting meme laughing about George Floyd’s death. He’s 25 years old. So, no, I no longer believe my generation will solve society’s ills no more than I think my children’s generation (or Noah Gragson’s) will move us forward.

They say the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging there is a problem. We haven’t graduated from that simple first step.  There is no low-hanging fruit when those on the other side will embrace any atrocity rather than let you “win.” And for that, society loses.

My generational fallacy has cost me. Not as much as those in the fight every day. It is a cost for which I feel the need to apologize. It has cost me from seeing the issues clearer. Evidence of that is easy to see. Reread this and count the number of times I say a version of “assume.” However, contrary to the familiar American saying, in this case, it has only made an ass out of me.  I hope to do better. I dream of our country doing better. And now, not generationally.

Today

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“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

With these words, quoted from Aeschylus, Robert Kennedy consoled African American campaign workers (and millions worldwide) in Indianapolis on this night 55 years ago after having announced to the crowd that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated earlier that evening in Memphis.

If you get a chance today, watch the speech he gave. It is shocking in its beauty and honesty. It was reported that the Secret Service told Kennedy they could not guarantee his safety if the crowd became violent. He gave the speech anyway.

He said, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. was 39 years old on that day. Imagine a different universe where he lived. What would the United States look like today? Would we have faced the horrific stain of slavery head-on and ensured equality among all our citizens? Would we finally be living in a nation where his (now grown) are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character? Maybe. Probably not. Intransigence and ennui ossify both the disengaged and unaffected. It is worth noting, Robert Kennedy was dead two months later, himself the victim of America’s gun violence.

At 58 years old, after a decade of railing against gun violence, that uniquely American disease, I am still haunted by the following sentiments when tending to my own heart and not the soul of our troubled nation:

Robert Kennedy:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Christopher Hitchens:

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that you won’t be able to stay neutral.”

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my ‘race,’ unless I was permitted to put ‘human.’ The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put ‘white,’ which is not even a color let alone a ‘race,’ and I sternly declined to put ‘Caucasian,’ which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King’s campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you ‘black.”

Today, a former president was arrested and indicted on criminal charges in Manhattan. Donald Trump is the antithesis of Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. because while they carried the torch of justice to move society ever closer to a bright future, he chose to pour gasoline on smoldering embers and moved us backward toward our dark past.

At a time when our country is as divided as ever, short of outright conflict, I hope there are more of us whose “purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better” than those who want to see it burn.

Doubt and About

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I seem to be suffering from a philosophical breach between the correlation of the concepts of equality, fairness, and justice.

Equality, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities.”

Likewise, fairness is defined as, “Treatment of people equally without favoritism or discrimination.”

And justice is defined as, “The quality of being fair and reasonable.”

It has always been my belief that these three ideas are interchangeable and, indeed, their very definitions weave the three words between themselves. The concept of heads and tails played out in words.

Ah, but life, they say, isn’t fair. In fact, William Goodman even went so far as to say that, “Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” I can think of nothing so completely inaccurate! Is there anything fairer than death? Is not death the greatest equalizer of all? Jim Morrison may have said it best when he said, “No one here gets out alive.”

But does that mean that life must be unfair? Our parents teach us to be fair to our siblings. Our teachers urge us to be fair to our classmates. The concept of sports is based on the rules of fairness. But as adults, we see fairness fade into a utopian panacea of equality we strive for but which few believe can be achieved which is itself then distilled into the feeble concept of justice we settle for and call law? Fairness is bastardized into law and laws are created by a political system that few trust. So then the answer is yes, life is unfair, unequal and unjust.

And so far, we have only touched on that which man can control. Nature is even less concerned with fairness. Here, biology, astronomy and the rest of the sciences are even less concerned with fairness and more concerned with physics and laws which pay no mind to humans or human suffering. The mechanisms of cancer in the human body, despite our best efforts, still march to orders little understood by medicine and unconcerned by fairness, wishes, or prayer. Cosmic gasses coalesce according to galactic influence, forming stars which burn, explode, collapse and die – again, all without concern for mankind’s wishes or prayers.

Ultimately, do we do our children a disservice when we tell them to treat each other fairly? Are we setting them up to become fodder for those less concerned with equality; leaving them to the sieve we call law, knowing too it is manipulated by the same usurpers who discard equality for their own benefit? And if so, what happens to society?

Governments, economies, races, religions or sexes, whenever we try to label an entire group we get into trouble. The United States is not a democracy; it is a constitutional republic on paper (with oligarchic underpinnings). There is no such thing as a purely socialist economy just as there is no such thing as a purely capitalist economy. A purely socialist economy will always fail because individual people are greedy. A capitalistic economy will only survive if it convinces the masses that they are all capitalists and not simply feeding the greediest at the top. And so labeling situations as purely fair or unfair for our children sets the expectation that, as adults, neutrality is the norm and justice is equality. Perhaps we are better off calling it what it is: building the flock.

We all want our children to succeed, but by engraining fairness into their moral and ethical DNA we are setting them up for economic failure, casting them out into the sea as chum for those sharks concerned with neither equality nor justice; acquiescing to our “better angels,” knowing that our children will be less “successful” but people we can call fair, equal and just.

And so they too will question the definitions of fairness, equality and justice as they struggle through life, seeing those less just than themselves achieve more than they and those more deserving struggle with less, as disease and misfortune picks off their beloved without warning or justification and the bigoted and ignorant thrive. The circle of an unfair life. But you can’t take it with you.